- For the last 6000 years, the journey of mankind has included the search for answers to existential questions of life: 1. Where did we come from? 2. Why are we here? 3. And where do we go when we die? Religion, Philosophy and science have sought to answer these questions, give us comfort, closure, provide community and expand our consciousness. This is our collective story as humans…a journey into life’s mysteries, beliefs, and revelations. …particularly from a Western perspective.
- We’ve color coded orange headers to represent events in religion and blue ones to represent those science. Gray is where religion and science intersect or neither.
- While no one knows exactly when the two books of Genesis were written and by whom, these ancient texts describe how God created the world, light, plants, animals and man. Centuries later, a catholic bishop estimated this date at 4004 BCE or Before the Common Era. Today, many still believe in divine creation and an earth that is less than 10000 years old.
- Genesis continues that Adam and Eve were placed in a Garden of Eden and fell from grace when they disobeyed God and ate a fruit from the tree of knowledge. Today, this is known as original sin and explains for some why life is often so difficult for us. Today some people interpret this literally .. while others interpret it metaphorically.
- Most ancients had a flat earth world view. Heaven was just beyond the clouds and Noah’s great flood was created when God unleashed the firmament waters from above.
- The Sumerians were a people who settled on the flood plains of the mighty Tigris and Euphrates Rivers around 4000 B.C in what is today part of Iraq. The area inspired some of the most important developments in human history, including the invention of cursive script, mathematics, astronomy, and agriculture.
- Around this time In Egypt, depictions of gods began showing up on tombs. The Egyptians were polytheistic and believed in many deities including Ra..the sun god, Isis, Osiris, Horus and Anubis. Many were presented as half-human and half-animal.
- Abraham was born around 2150 BCE in present day Mesopotamia. He migrated to Egypt and then Canaan, which is present day West Bank Israel. Abraham is considered the patriarch of three great faiths …Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Whereas other civilizations worshiped many gods, Abraham believed in only one God. Today there are over 4 billion followers of these three faiths.
- The great pyramids of Egypt were built between 2550 and 2480 BCE. The pantheon of gods was ultimately replaced by other religious traditions including Christianity.
- About 2000 BCE, Hinduism originated in India as a collection of beliefs …ultimately resulting in over 33 million distinct deities. To put into perspective, there are less than 800,000 words in the King James Bible. Today, there are over a billion followers of this faith tradition.
- Around 900 BCE the ancient Greeks believed in gods that ruled from atop Mount Olympus. Zeus commanded lightning, Poseidon ruled the Seas, Apollo’s flaming chariot was seen as the sun. The Romans later adopted these same gods as Jupiter, Neptune, and Saturn. This polytheistic belief was ultimately replaced by Christianity in the third and fourth centuries of the Common Era.
- In 500 BCE, the Parthenon Temple was completed at the Acropolis in Athens as a tribute to Athena, the goddess of wisdom. The temple survived over 1000 years but was severely damaged in 1687 when it was shelled during bombardment.
- Confucius says "Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it." - Confucius was a renowned Chinese philosopher, poet and politician. To this day, his teachings and philosophies remain influential across China, East Asia.
- 17. Pythagoras of Samos was an ancient Greek philosopher and most well known for the Pythagorean theorem. His political and religious teachings influenced the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, and Western philosophy. He believed in a "transmigration of souls", which holds that every soul is immortal and, upon death, enters into a new body.
- Ancient Greek thinker Aristotle is credited with advances in a number disciplines. Not only did he realize that the earth was a sphere but was the first known person to try and calculate its size and circumference. Later, in 274 BCE, Eratosthenes more accurately calculated circumference and even axial tilt.
- Archimedes of Syracuse lived between 287 and 212 BCE and is considered to be the greatest mathematician of ancient history. He anticipated modern calculus and invented the Archimedes Screw which is still used in crop irrigation
- In 567 BCE, Prince Siddharta was born in India. The Buddha, as he became known, was and is revered as an enlightened being. The movement differs from other traditions in that it is a philosophy rather than a call to worship a supernatural being. In our time, Buddhism has over 500 million followers.
- Jesus of Nazareth was crucified in 33 CE. His followers would come to believe that he was resurrected from the dead and represented a vicarious blood sacrifice and atonement for the sins of man. Over 31% of the world’s population self-identify as Christians.
- One of Jesus’s early followers was Stephen. His expressed belief in Jesus so outraged the Jewish Pharisees that they stoned him to death. And Saul of Tarsus was one of those participating in the stoning.
- After Stephen’s martyrdom, Saul was on the road to Damascus and was blinded by a vision he believed to be that of Jesus. Saul’s conversion from persecutor of Christians to follower of Christ was dramatic. He changed his name to Paul and became the leading messenger for the Gospel of the New Testament. Being a Pharisee, Paul had believed he was subject to the numerous laws in the Old Testament. He would come to believe that Jesus was the ultimate “Lamb of God” sacrifice and introduced a new covenant based on God's love.
- As early as 1500 BCE the Maya had settled in villages and were practicing agriculture in Mesoamerica. The Classic Period of Mayan culture lasted from about 250 CE until about 900. At its height, Mayan civilization consisted of more than 40 cities, each with a population between 5,000 and 50,000.
- Constantine was the first Roman emperor to convert to Christianity and believed that his faith allowed him to win civil wars against emperors Maxentius and Licinius. In 313, Constantine issued the Edict of Milan which opened the way for Christianity to become the official religion of Rome. He became sole ruler of the Roman Empire by 324.
- By 325, Constantine convened many early Christian leaders at Nicaea in what is now Iznik, Turkey. The council came to consensus regarding the “Holy Trinity”, an initial Nicene Creed, and when to observe Easter. This event standardized the message of Christianity which became the state religion of the Roman Empire by 380 .
- By 426, St Augustine outlined a doctrine of Hell in his Latin manuscript entitled the “City of God”. He expounded on questions of theology, such as the suffering of the righteous, the existence of evil, the conflict between free will and divine omniscience, and the doctrine of original sin.
- In 570, the prophet Mohammed, the founder of Islam, was born in Mecca. Around 610, he claimed to hear an angel say to him, “You are the Messenger of God.” Thus began a lifetime of religious revelations collected in the Qur'an. Islam, claims Abraham as its patriarch and has over 1.9 billion followers. Every year million of the faithful travel on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
- In 800 and over 300 years after the fall of Rome ( in 476), Charlemagne is crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. He reunited areas of modern day Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Austria and Italy and imposed baptism by the sword.
- Over centuries, theological and political differences developed between Eastern and Western Christianity. And by 1054 there was a great schism between the Catholic Church and Eastern Orthodox Churches.
- The Franks in the First Crusade captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid Caliphate in 1099 CE . For two-hundred years, there were more Crusades to reclaim the holy land from Islamic infidels. These middle ages were filled with stories of kings, queens, knights and castles which still fill our stories and imaginations today.
- In 1096 Oxford University was founded in England. Cambridge would follow in 1209. These centers of learning and inquiry… and others like them would be where theologians, scientists and political leaders would receive their educations.
- Thomas Aquinas was born in 1225 and developed Five proofs for God. Later, philosophers David Hume and Immanuel Kant raised objections to Aquinas concept of causality. “If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause too.
- At the Second Council of Lyon in 1247, the Catholic Church defined its teaching on purgatory… the Eastern Orthodox Church did not adopt the doctrine. It has been suggested that “the fires of purgatory were not punitive like those in hell… but purifying"
- Italian Dante Aligheri completed his narrative poem entitled “Divine Comedy” in 1321. It is an imaginary journey through Hell, Purgatory and Paradise, the work explores ideas of the afterlife in medieval Christian belief.
- An ocean away, from 1300 - 1521, The Aztec Civilization flourished in the Americas. They were a culture obsessed with death and believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing. When a Great Pyramid was consecrated in 1487 thousands of people were slaughtered.
- The Spanish Inquisition was a judicial institution that lasted between 1478 and 1834. Its purpose was to combat heresy in Spain, but, in practice, it resulted in consolidating power in the monarchy of the newly unified Spanish kingdom. Its brutal methods led to widespread death and suffering.
- The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages. From the 14th century to the 17th century, the era promoted the rediscovery of classical philosophy, literature and art. Raphael’s painting - The School of Athens has long been seen as the embodiment of the classical spirit of the times".
- In 1492, Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus, setting out to find a new trade route to the Far East, sails the ocean blue and discovers American continents instead. He mistakenly believes the inhabitants he meets are Indians…but the name sticks.
- By 1500 the catholic Church was in the business of selling plenary indulgences, which were certificates believed to reduce the temporal punishment in purgatory for sins committed by the purchasers or their loved ones.
- Outraged by this practice, Martin Luther, a Professor of moral theology in Germany distributes 95 theses and helps to spark the reformation. In these Theses, Luther claimed that the repentance required by Christ to be forgiven involves inner spiritual repentance rather than merely external sacramental confession. He argued that indulgences led Christians to avoid true repentance and sorrow for sin.
- In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan.. leads a Spanish expedition to the East Indies across the Pacific Ocean to open a maritime trade route from the Atlantic to Asia. While Magellan was killed in a battle near the present-day Philippines, some of the expedition survived and circumnavigated the Earth to return to Spain in 1522.
- In 1534, King Henry VIII separated the English Church from Rome. A theological separation and English Reformation gained political support when Henry VIII wanted an annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon so he could marry Anne Boleyn. Pope Clement VII refused the annulment. Eventually, Henry took the position of Head of the English Church and was later excommunicated by Pope Paul III.
- In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus formulated a model of the universe that placed the Sun rather than Earth at its center. In all likelihood, Copernicus developed his model independently of Aristarchus of Samos, an ancient Greek astronomer who had formulated such a model some eighteen centuries earlier.
- In 1560, Unitarianism originated in Transylvania. This movement believes that Jesus was inspired by God in his moral teachings, but he was not a deity or God incarnate. Unitarianism also rejected doctrines of original sin, predestination, hell and the infallibility of the Bible. While not a large faith, its ideals would have profound influence on founding fathers of the United States including Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and James Monroe.
- In the 17th-century and from a literal reading of the Genesis, Archbishop James Ussher, deduced that the world was created in 4004 BCE. Reconciling the increasingly apparent age of the planet with the bible’s account in Genesis has been a major concern of many Christian scholars over the centuries. According to Gallup polls as recent as 2010, 44% of respondents consistently endorse the following statement God created human beings in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years
- Pascal's wager is a philosophical argument presented by the seventeenth-century French Blaise Pascal. It posits that human beings wager with their eternal lives regarding their belief that God either exists or not. Pascal's wager charted new territory in probability theory and marked the first formal use of decision theory in risk management.
- In 1623, English physician William Harvey became the first to describe completely, and in detail, the systemic circulation and properties of blood being pumped to the brain and the rest of the body by the heart.
- Italian Galileo Galilei invented a telescope and has been called the "father" of observational astronomy, modern physics, and the scientific method. Galileo championed Copernican heliocentrism and was met with opposition from the Catholic Church. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition which concluded that heliocentrism was foolish, absurd, and heretical since it contradicted Holy Scripture.
- While Galileo looked at the heavens, Englishman Robert Hooke using a microscope, was the first to see microorganisms. Hooke's 1665 book Micrographia spurred further microscopic investigations.
- Sir Isaac Newton is widely recognized as one of the greatest mathematicians and scientists of all time. He was a key figure in the philosophical revolution known as the Enlightenment. In “Principia”, first published in 1687, Newton formulated the laws of motion and universal gravitation that formed the dominant scientific viewpoint until it was superseded by the theory of relativity. He would also make contributions in optics and calculus.
- The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found guilty, nineteen of whom were executed by hanging.
- Benjamin Franklin proposed an experiment to prove that lightning is electricity by flying a kite in a storm. On May 10, 1752, Thomas-François Dalibard of France conducted Franklin's experiment and extracted electrical sparks from a cloud. Franklin described the experiment in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette without mentioning whether he himself had performed it.
- On the morning of November 1, 1755, All Saints Day, a series of earthquakes caused 20 foot Tsunamis. Many people were observing All Saints Day in churches at the time and between 10 and 50,000 died when the buildings collapsed. Religious authorities proclaimed that the earthquake was caused by the wrath of God, brought on the city because of its sins.
- William Paley was an English clergyman. in his work Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity he makes use of the watchmaker analogy. In 1986, Oxford Professor Richard Dawkins published “The Blind Watchmaker” countering the teleological argument from design.
- Joseph Smith Jr. was an American religious leader, publisher of the Book of Mormon, and founder of Mormonism. According to the Church of Latter Day Saints, he received over 100 revelations during his life given in the first person voice of Jesus Christ. Most were published in Doctrines and Covenants. One can’t help but notice the similarity to revelation stories of St. Paul and Mohammed. The LDS Church recently reported having over 16 million members worldwide.
- Pierre-Simon Laplace is remembered as one of the greatest scientists of all time. In 1814, he developed a theory of the universe which he presented to Napoleon. As the story goes, Napoleon asked Laplace why the theory contained no mention of God. Laplace is said to have replied, "I have no need of that hypothesis.”
- Thomas Jefferson is well known for being being an American president and author of the Declaration of Independence. What is little known is that in 1819 he created an Abridged version of the bible entitled “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth”, by cutting and pasting numerous sections from the New Testament. Jefferson's version excludes all miracles and passages that portray Jesus as divine.
- Megalosaurus, found in 1824, is the first dinosaur ever discovered. In Greek, it’s name means "great lizard", and is an extinct carnivorous theropod of the Jurassic period. The first naturalists who investigated Megalosaurus mistook it for a gigantic lizard of 20 meters length. It was later concluded that it was no longer than 9 meters but stood on upright legs.
- In 1831, english scientist Michael Faraday invented the Electric generator. This invention formed the foundation of electric motor technology, and it was largely due to his efforts that electricity became practical for use in technology.
- Around 1830, Sir Charles Lyell, was a Scottish geologist who demonstrated the power of known natural causes in explaining the earth's history. He emphasized the significance of "deep time" for understanding the earth and environment and surmised that the earth is vastly old.
- Gregor Johann Mendel….Though farmers had known for millennia that crossbreeding of animals and plants could favor certain desirable traits, Mendel's pea plant experiments conducted between 1856 and 1863 established many of the rules of heredity. He published his work in 1866, demonstrating the actions of invisible "factors"—now called genes—in predictably determine the traits of an organism.
- In 1859, Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species”. Darwin's book introduced the scientific theory that populations evolve over the course of generations through a process of natural selection. He included evidence collected on his Beagle expedition in the 1830s and subsequent findings from research, correspondence, and experimentation.
- In 1861, Archaeopteryx was discovered. This early avian had much in common with small dinosaurs… jaws, sharp teeth, three fingers with claws, a long bony tail, killing claw, feathers and various features of the skeleton. Archaeopteryx seemed to confirm Darwin's theories and has since become a key piece of evidence for the origin of birds, the transitional fossils debate, and confirmation of evolution.
- In 1861 Louis Pasteur published the Germ theory of disease. It states that microorganisms known as pathogens …which are too small to see without magnification…can invade humans and other animals. Their growth and reproduction within their hosts can cause disease. "Germ" may refer to bacterium, fungi, viruses, prions, or viroids.
- In 1871, Darwin published The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. It applied evolutionary theory to human evolution, and detailed his theory of sexual selection, a form of biological adaptation related to natural selection. The book discusses differences between sexes, the dominant role of women in mate choice, and the relevance of the evolutionary theory to society.
- In 1875, Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone and received a US patent for the device by 1876. The device converts sound, typically human voice, into electronic signals that are transmitted via cables to another device which reproduces the sound for the receiving user. This instrument would became rapidly indispensable in business, government, and in households.
- By January 1879, at his laboratory in Menlo Park New Jersey, Thomas Edison built his first high resistance, incandescent electric light. It worked by passing electricity through a thin platinum filament in the glass vacuum bulb, which delayed the filament from melting. Still, the lamp only burned for a few short hours.
- In 1883, Existentialist philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche writes “God is dead”. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?
- In 1903, Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Using a home-built wind tunnel, the Wrights had collected the data enabling them to design more efficient wings and propellers. They also focused on developing a reliable method of pilot control as the key to solving "the flying problem". Today there are over 25,000 active commercial and 18,000 military aircraft.
- In 1905, German-born Albert Einstein published four groundbreaking papers, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, which were to bring him to the notice of the academic world, at the age of 26. His formula E = mc2, has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation".
- In 1924, American astronomer Edwin Powell Hubble discovered the Andromeda Galaxy. Hubble proved that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as "nebulae" were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way. Hubble's name is most widely recognized for the Hubble Space Telescope, which was named in his honor.
- In 1925, commonly referred to as the Scopes Monkey Trial, high school teacher, John T. Scopes, was accused of violating Tennessee's Butler Act, which had made it unlawful to teach human evolution in any state-funded school.The trial was deliberately staged in order to attract publicity to the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. Scopes was unsure whether he had ever actually taught evolution, but he incriminated himself deliberately so the case could have a defendant.
- In 1927, Bertrand Arthur Russell, a British academic and polymath published an essay entitled “Why I am not a Christian”. Russell considers a number of logical arguments for the existence of God and goes into specifics about Christian theology. He argues against the "argument from design", favoring Darwin's theories.
- William Franklin Graham Jr. was an American evangelist and Southern Baptist minister who held large rallies called “Crusades” that were broadcast on radio and television for six decades. He also hosted the radio show Hour of Decision from 1950 to 1954. Graham helped shape the worldview of a huge number of people who came from different backgrounds.
- During World War II and between 1941 and 1945, some six million Jews were placed and killed in Nazi German concentration camps. Following Adolf Hitler's appointment as chancellor, the regime built a network of concentration camps in Germany for political opponents and those deemed "undesirable", starting with Dachau in March 1933.
- On July 16, 1945 the world's first nuclear explosion released an amount of energy approximately equal to 20,000 tons of TNT when tested at a site located 210 miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer, who witnessed the detonation, recited a piece of Hindu scripture “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
- In 1947, John Bardeen and Walter Brattain at AT&T's Bell Labs in New Jersey, observed that when two gold point contacts were applied to a crystal of germanium, a signal was produced with the output power greater than the input. Group leader William Shockley saw the potential in this, and over the next few months worked to greatly expand the knowledge of semiconductors.
- The Dead Sea Scrolls are ancient Jewish and Hebrew religious manuscripts first found in 1947 at the Qumran Caves on the northern shore of the Dead Sea. Dating back to between the 3rd century BCE and the 1st century CE, they are among the most important finds in the history of archaeology.
- The double-helix model of DNA structure was first published in the journal Nature by James Watson and Francis Crick in 1953 based on the work of Rosalind Franklin and others. Their discovery is widely considered one of the most important scientific discoveries of the 20th century.
- By using lead isotopic data from the Canyon Diablo meteorite, Clair Cameron Patterson calculated an accurate age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years and one that has remained largely unchanged since 1956.
- In 1956 Charles K Johnson founds the Flat Earth Society. Johnson argued that the "Bible, alongside our senses, supported the idea that the earth was flat and immovable and this essential truth should not be set aside for a system based solely on human conjecture". He claimed that the Apollo Moon landings, and space exploration in general, were faked to lead people away from the biblical truth that the world was flat.
- In 1957, in his work “A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance”, Leon Festinger proposed that human beings strive for internal psychological consistency to function mentally in the real world. Coping with the nuances of contradictory ideas or experiences is mentally stressful. It requires energy and effort to sit with those seemingly opposite things that all seem true.
- In 1959, Mary & Louis Leakey discovered the skull of an early hominid at Olduvai Gorge in Africa confirming earlier species of man predicted in Darwin's writings. A number of early or proto-human fossils eventually would be found including Australopithecus, Homo Habilis and Homo erectus. Australopithecus fossils have been found that are over 3.7 million years old. The brains of most were roughly 35% of the size of a modern human brain.
- In 1962, in his book “Profiles of the Future” science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke formulated his famous Three Laws, of which the third law is the best-known and most widely cited: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”.
- In 1966, a science fiction television program named Star Trek debuted and quickly became a worldwide pop-culture phenomenon. Created by Gene Roddenbery, the franchise would earn over $10.6 billion in revenue from television and films. The show explored a vision for the future including contact with alien species and advances in communication, transport and medical technologies.
- In 1969, Apollo 11’s lunar module Eagle landed on the moon. Commander Neil Armstrong became the first person to step onto the lunar surface and was later joined by crewmate Buzz Aldrin. Armstrong's first step was broadcast on live TV to a worldwide audience. He described the event as "one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."
- The first permanent ARPANET link was established on 21 November 1969, between the IMP at UCLA and the IMP at the Stanford Research Institute. ARPANET was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet.
- In 1976, engineer Steve Wozniak, while working at HP, built the Apple-1 computer from scratch. He finished his work in March 1976. Together with Steve Jobs and Ronald G. Wayne they founded the company Apple Computer that would make history and change the world by introducing an era of personal computing.
- Jonestown, Guyana was the scene of one of the most harrowing tragedies in American history. On November 18, 1978, at the direction of charismatic cult leader Jim Jones, 909 members of the People’s Temple died, all but two from apparent cyanide poisoning, in a “revolutionary suicide.”. It was the largest mass suicide in modern history and resulted in the largest single loss of American civilian life in a non-natural disaster until September 11, 2001.
- In 1975, one of the first megachurches in the US was Willow Creek Community Church founded by Dave Holmbo and Bill Hybels. Megachurch sermons are often inspirational, motivational, relevant and well-delivered but the message remains solidly conservative Christian. Today there are over 1500 such churches in America and one even exceeds 40,000 attendees in a week.
- The 1980s gave rise to televangelism. A uniquely American phenomenon, resulting from a largely deregulated access to television networks and cable TV, Televangelists such as Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker would gain huge audience followings.
- In 1990, The Hubble telescope is named after astronomer Edwin Hubble would be launched into orbit. The eye in the sky would provide spectacular images of space phenomena including galaxies and nebulae.
- In 1992, the first exoplanet is discovered outside our solar system furthering the notion that we might not be alone in the universe. A different planet, initially detected in 1988, was confirmed in 2003. As of 2022, there are 4,905 confirmed exoplanets in 3,629 planetary systems, with 808 systems having more than one planet.
- On September 11, 2001 Islamic extremist hijacked passenger jets and flew them into the New York Twin Trade towers and the Pentagon. A fourth plane was intended to crash into a target in Washington, D.C., but instead crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. The hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and several other Arab nations.
- In 2003 CE, the human Genome project was declared complete. The goal was to determine the base pairs that make up human DNA and sequence all of the genes of the human genome from both a physical and a functional standpoint. A later sequencing would compare human and chimpanzee DNA and use endogenous retrovirus markers to estimate a split in lineage about 6 million years ago.
- In 2012 CRISPR-CAS 9, a gene editing tool, is created This editing process has a wide variety of applications including basic biological research, development of biotechnological products, and treatment of diseases. The development of the CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing technique was recognized by the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020 which was awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna
- Ark Encounter is a Christian religious and Young Earth creationist theme park that opened in northern Kentucky in 2016. The centerpiece of the park is a large representation of Noah's Ark based on the Genesis flood narrative contained in the Bible. It is 510 feet long, 85 feet wide, and 51 feet high. An estimated 800K to 1 million people visit the park each year.